Blackouts

Blackouts (2023) is American novelist Justin Torres’s second novel. It discusses queer identity, the violent suppression of LGBTQ+ history, and institutional violence against LGBTQ+ people. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction. As of 2024, Torres is an English professor at the University of California. His first novel was the pseudo-autographical bildungsroman We The Animals (2011), which follows three brothers of Puerto Rican and white heritage as they grow up in New York City in the 1980s. The National Book Foundation named Torres a “5 under 35” writer in 2012.

Blackouts consists of six parts, each divided into short, untitled subsections. Parts 1-5 are interspersed with multimedia elements, including pictures of paintings, photographs, and illustrations. Redacted pages from Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (a real-life sexological study completed in 1941) appear throughout the novel. Some images directly connect to the text, while others simply exist.

This guide references the Farrar, Strauss and Giroux electronic edition (2023).

Content Warning: Blackouts uses the descriptor “queer” to signify LGBTQ+ identities and reclaim queer history. It discusses anti-LGBTQ+ bias (including slurs), violence (including domestic violence, medical violence, and state-promoted violence), racism (including eugenics), fatal illness and death, attempted suicide, sexual assault (including by doctors), and sex with a minor.

Plot Summary

Blackouts begins with an unnamed narrator—who is referred to by the Spanish nickname “Nene”—arriving at “the Palace” in search of his dying friend—Juan Gay—whom he met when they were committed to a psychiatric hospital 10 years ago. Part 1 alternates between the present—in which Nene and Juan converse—and the past, told through Nene’s flashbacks. These flashbacks mirror Nene and Juan’s present conversation. Nene begins secretly living in Juan’s room, where Juan keeps a large collection of ephemera on the life of Jan Gay—his adoptive mother and real-life lesbian sexologist from the 1940s, who is considered a key figure in LGBTQ+ rights—and a redacted copy of a two-volume research study entitled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. Nene presses for Juan’s story, which concerns his wish for Nene to “finish” Jan Gay’s work after he himself dies, but Juan continually turns their discussion to Nene’s past. Juan asks Nene to meticulously recount their time in the psychiatric hospital, but Nene is distracted by various asides. He becomes increasingly focused on Juan, has a brief, anonymous sexual encounter, and then returns to tell Juan of his family history.

In Part 2, Juan explains the history of the Sex Variants study. This narrative is intertwined with Juan’s personal history with Jan Gay and her wife Zhenya, who briefly adopted Juan as a child; Zhenya used him as a model for her children’s book illustrations. Juan, who frequently quotes from literature and film, speaks of various figures in queer history; he otherwise sleeps through the day. Nene reads Sex Variants, waiting for night. He entertains Juan with a story about his sex work for a rich man, and they discuss combining truth and imagination to make new forms of narrative.

In Part 3, Juan recounts being diagnosed with “Puerto Rican Syndrome,” also known as ataques de nervios (literally, an “attack of nerves”). The condition, common to his family, initially did not impact his life, though it ultimately led to him being committed to a psychiatric hospital as an adolescent. He offers anecdotes about his life with Jan and Zhenya Gay, and Nene tells a story in which he began to associate the crucifix with nascent queer desire. They read one of Zhenya’s books for which Juan modeled, with Juan framing it as an allegory for the gay experience in the pre-Stonewall era.

Parts 4-5 intersperse Nene and Juan’s conversations with stories structured like films. In Nene’s story, a young man named Sal (an analogue for Nene) and an older man named Norwood have an affair. Intercut with this affair are in-film flashbacks wherein Sal revisits a group of friends, whom he calls “the girls.” Juan interjects with questions about the technical elements of this imagined film. His own film takes the form of a series of vignettes about Jan and other researchers in the Sex Variants study. He eventually abandons the filmic format. Juan discusses Jan’s father, Ben Reitman, who was anarchist Emma Goldman’s manager and lover. Suddenly, he stops and urges Nene to tell the story of his breakup with ex-boyfriend Liam in reverse chronology. Nene does so, illustrating how his choice to do sex work and not tell Liam about it led to their breakup.

Part 6 is the only part without multimodal elements. In it, Juan’s lucidity wanes as death approaches. He hallucinates visitors, whom he attempts to recount to Nene. He dies, and Nene ends the novel with a happy memory of them embracing.